Wednesday, August 08, 2007

...for the merciless slaying of my rear wheel. I am not kidding that this is the 5th broken spoke I've had to deal with on this wheel. That's right, I found another one. I'm not doing anything different than usual, either. I took it easy this morning. I really don't know what's going on, but I don't like it.

I somehow missed the Express Antioch bus, so I'm on the Quivira D bus. I swear, the D must stand for dreaded, derogatory, death, despair, disdain, and any other word beginning with D that can be used to paint something in a negative light. There's no reason that a motor vehicle should take a whole hour to transport humans 15 miles or so.

Anyhow, I get to go take my wheel back down to the LBS again. Sigh.

Update - The guys at Bike America hooked me up with yet another brand new wheel. They rock, and I'm happy. :)

I also have enough spare parts to build a bitchin' spare wheel. The Tiagra hub and decent spokes off my bike's OEM wheel will work nicely with the rim of the last wheel. I may attempt to take some of this stuff apart and do my own wheel rebuild sometime soon.

Good thought, but I went through a lot of testing and adjusting to ensure no spoke nor heel interference is met: which stuff goes in which side, what straps get tightened how far and how far back the panniers get mounted, etc.

Hmmmm, maybe you need a wheel with a much thicker gauge spoke, I do have a extra rear wheel that had been re-laced with thicker spokes I can sell you for a really good price, it came off my first bike that had had broken a spoke and when I took it back there was quite alot of wheels on that model of bike that was breaking spokes, so my bike shop re-laced the whole wheel free of charge.Just let me know if you would like to at least try it for a period to see if it will take care of those spoke issues.

Thanks, but they gave me a nice Shimano R500 wheel, which isn't that great but it's a definite upgrade over the Alex wheel I had on there.

The OEM wheel (which I flatspotted on a storm drain) had a decent Tiagra freehub body on it. The second wheel that I got came with an el-cheapo HB-2200 that just felt chinsey, even compared to the Tiagra hub. I didn't bother looking at the freehub model number on the new R500 they gave me, but it feels solid, possibly moreso than the OEM Tiagra (HB-4400?) body.

Regardless, the new wheel comes with thicker shimano-brand spokes compared to the useless pieces of junk in my Alex R450. I'm thinking of taking the rim off of it, and lacing it to the freehub and spokes from my OEM wheel, or possibly buying all new spokes.

As it stands, I have one wheel that I'm pretty sure will last me a while, and enough stuff to fabricate a backup wheel that will hopefully be a little more bulletproof than the sum of its parts. Thanks for the offer, though.

It's weird how many spokes you break. Hopefully the new wheel will solve that problem. The wheels that came with my road bike give me pause because they have a low spoke count, but so far, so good (knock on wood).

Privacy Policy

This site is driven by software that uses third-party cookies from Google (Blogger, AdSense, Feedburner and their associates.) Cookies are small pieces of non-executable data stored by your web browser, often for the purpose of storing preferences or data from previous visits to a site. No individual user is directly tracked by this or any other means, but I do use the aggregate data for statistics purposes.

By leaving a link or e-mail address in my comments (including your blogger profile or website URL), you acknowledge that the published comment and associated links will be available to the public and that they will likely be clicked on.

Sponsors

RSS Feed

Contact me!

If you'd like to contact me outside the comments, leave a message and I'll respond. Oh yeah, if you're going to send me a URL, ask me if you can send me one first, then send it when I reply. If not, my spam troll will eat your fingers for breakfast.